Eric A. Kort

Assistant Professor

Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Michigan

Welcome

The earth’s atmospheric composition is experiencing a perturbation unprecedented in the recent history. Various human activities, including large-scale deforestation, fossil fuel harvesting and combustion, and industrial scale crop fertilization have tremendously upset the planet’s carbon and nitrogen cycles and led to large increases in the atmospheric abundance of greenhouse gases. These changes are ongoing and dynamic. Anthropogenic emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases are undergoing rapid alterations in response to technological, economic, and regulatory pressures. Natural sources and sinks are dynamically responding to the warming environment, with unknown feedbacks. We employ a combination of ground, airborne, and space-based observations to investigate both natural and anthropogenic sources of these atmospheric constituents. We link observations with models probing scales that span from cities to the globe, quantifying and attributing emissions. This leads to improved understanding of carbon and nitrogen cycles which is crucial for future projections of climate and air quality, and is necessary to inform societal responses and mitigation efforts.

News

2018

A quick start to 2018 with two field campaigns -- one focused on offshore oil and gas emissions, as well as the second deployment of the Greenhouse gas Emissions in the Midwest (GEM-2) campaign.

Kort group participates if the Greenhouse gas Emissions in the Midwest (GEM-1) campaign collecting flight measurements based in Minnesota.

Scientific American article on Arctic Methane references Kort group work on methane in the region.

The Center for Investigative Reporting article on Four Corners references TOPDOWN study and findings.

Prof. Kort co-leads a workshop on methane at Caltech. Thanks to the Linde Center, KISS, and all participants for such a productive meeting!

Our work studying methane emissions from the Four Corners region played a prominent role in Senator Heinrich's speech on the Senate floor. -- the figure he is showing if straight from Kort et al., GRL 2014. This work was also referenced by Senator Udall's release.

Successful conclusions to to FEAST (Fertilizer Emissions Airborne STudy) project! Excellent work by Sandro, Mackenzie and Scientific Aviation as we demonstrated new measurement capabilities and have exciting data on nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer plants and agricultural fields in the Mississippi River valley! It was particularly interesting this year given the historic flooding.

2016

First paper from our Four Corners study is published in PNAS. This work demonstrates the use of airborne remote sensing to identify methane plumes at meter-level resolution in a complex environment. We also directly observe that emissions of methane from point sources in Four Corners exhibit a lognormal distribution, where the largest emitters contribute disproportionately to total basin emissions.

Carbon dioxide measurements made by us and others on the ORCAS team show 400 ppm threshold making its way into the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere, exceeding levels last seen millions of years ago when sea level and temperatures were higher than today.

We are excited that Research Assistant Emily Yang will be joining the PhD program this fall.

NASA Earth Observatory article on methane discusses our work in Four Corners and the TOPDOWN flights we led as part of that effort.

Successful conclusions to ORCAS! Excellent work by the whole team to manage flights in such a remote region of the world, and handle wind-evacuations with such grace. We are excited to look at the data in more detail (and sort photos from the field).

ORCAS project is off to a successful start! The campaign can be followed on the field catalog, and news articles are noted here as well.

2015

Paper on methane emissions from the Barnett shale bridging the gap between inventories and atmospheric studies is published in PNAS.

We just completed a successful data workshop in Boulder that brought together multiple studies focused on emissions from oil and gas production. We are looking forward to seeing the finalized results that come out of these studies!

Welcome to Dr. Martin Hoecker-Martinez & Emily Yang, who have joined the group.

Papers from the Barnett campaign are now out in ES&T, including an article led by postdoc Mackenzie Smith pioneering the use of continuous airborne ethane observations for methane source attribution and ethane flux quantification. The article

The team just completed a successful field campaign in the Four Corners region as part of TOPDOWN 2015. 5 aircraft, 2 mobile labs, and 1 satellite!

Postdoc Mackenzie Smith is profiled in an article about the Four Corners study.